Empire's End by Leila Rasheed

Author:Leila Rasheed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic UK
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dis Manibus: to the spirits of the departed.

Marcia Numidia, who lived 39 years, seven

months and six days. Neptune took her.

She was a good wife and a good mother.

It didn’t seem enough to me, but what else was there to say? The stonemason charged for each letter. I didn’t like the fact that it could be any woman on the stone, but again, we had no choice. Our orders were to accompany the Emperor to Eboracum the very next day. There was no time to get the perfect memorial stone. Nothing was happening the way I had expected it to.

The stone was set up just outside the city walls, and my father poured a libation in front of it and we said a prayer.

I closed my eyes and prayed before the memorial in the cold wind of a strange land that still felt unsteady beneath my feet. Please, gods, be kind to her spirit.

“Camilla! Camilla!”

Mother was calling me, her voice high and urgent. She stood by a spring, which gushed water over bare, cold, grassy British hills. But the water was frozen and there was ice on the rocks.

“Ma!”

She stretched out her arms to me, and I ran towards her. But as soon as I threw my arms around her, she vanished like smoke or mist. I fell forwards – and woke with a start.

The light was all wrong; dreary and damp. Was I still dreaming? I rolled upright from the bed, and the hollow, sick feeling in my stomach was there before I realised why it was there: it was a dream – my mother was dead. I was in a room in the mansio, the inn of the port where all the weary travellers first went to collapse when they landed from the river. My father had told me to rest while he went out to the market to get medicines.

And yet I still ran downstairs in case somehow, somehow. . . because dreams come from the gods, after all.

I came out into the courtyard, blinking and confused. By the looks of things it was late in the day, but although the sun was hidden behind thick veils of clouds the light still stayed around, like a guest that wouldn’t leave. I noticed I was not the only one who was slinking around, glancing at the heavy grey sky mistrustfully as if, like the Gauls, they feared it would one day fall on their heads. I was expecting everything to be different, but the voices and the houses and the shops around me were the same, like Rome. What was different were the things I wasn’t expecting to change. The light. And my mother. She was not there, though her voice had sounded so real.

I still couldn’t quite believe she was really gone. Already the storm felt like a bad dream. I kept expecting her to come around the corner, just a little delayed, breathless, anxious and saying: “Now you are soon to be married. . .” But she was not there.

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